Essential Factors to Keep In Mind When Configuring a Video Playlist

An exciting development in recent years is the rapid growth of video content which has become publishers' biggest tool to boost user engagement alongside traditional content mediums. Video is crucial for site traffic growth, given the fact that it is now the most popular choice for content consumption.

In 2022, an average person is predicted to spend 100 minutes per day watching online videos. Therefore, it is essential for digital content businesses to think strategically about their video approach, including selecting the most effective playlist to entice and engage with audiences and ensure they maintain interest. 

Minute Media understood this need, which led us to creating our cutting-edge Online Video Platform (OVP), Voltax Video, which enables digital content businesses to manage and showcase their content in one central location. Since launching Voltax Video in 2020, we have already assisted a wealth of partners to experience unparalleled growth in the industry by providing premium content across all genres - including sports, lifestyle, entertainment, finance, health, weather, culture, and more - as well as robust playlist options. 

Our OVP has three different playlist configurations -  Freestyle, Dynamic and Semantic - with each offering different valuable elements that contribute towards delivering quality content at scale. 

When selecting the best-suited playlist for your site, you want to consider every aspect that will help precisely engage your target audience. A vital key to the success of a business is setting measurable strategies in place that align with the main goals and milestones of the organization. 

Voltax Video supports brands in achieving KPIs with the flexibility each playlist has to offer. Whether you require the site to engage with the audience with varying content or directly advertise a product with a specific video, you can align the playlist directly with the organization's KPIs.

As a leader within the digital content space, we have accumulated the necessary expertise and experience in video optimization to understand the importance of choosing the right playlist for specific video strategies. Much like buying a new pair of running shoes, you want to review the utility of each option to gain optimum results. Let’s take you through the top three tips for choosing and setting up the best video playlist for your strategy. 

Examine Your Target Audience

First, you’ll need to examine your target audience. It is vital to define and segment your target audience in order to determine which content will resonate with them and how to best approach your video strategy for each segment. 

Audience segmentation is the process of dividing users into groups depending on their consumer behaviors, traits, and consumption habits to track and target what content is keeping them engaged with the brand. When using a one-size-fits-all content marketing approach, we overlook each consumer’s individual needs, a key requirement in creating brand loyalty. 

Using data from these segments, such as session duration and page views per month, we can outline what drives this behavior and develop more relevant and targeted content, ultimately assisting in achieving the brand KPIs. By tracking these behaviors, brands have more opportunities to analyze and create specific strategies to improve consumer experiences. Voltax Video's three different playlist options can help in optimizing these goals. 

Our Freestyle Playlist includes manually selecting the most relevant video to complement the site, providing you with full control of what the audience will be shown. For instance, if a publisher wants to highlight a new video partnership with Nike, the publisher would ideally use the Freestyle Playlist to ensure that every visitor to the site is shown content that showcases this new partnership. The content in this scenario is not contextual and is required to be the same content for each visitor.

With choosing the Freestyle Playlist option, the publisher in this example benefits from having complete control over the duration of the content being displayed and ensuring only the promotional content they have created with Nike has full attention from the audience, maximizing their ultimate goal. 

Based on the campaign targeting received from the advertiser, you can use this data to ensure the video is being shown to their ideal audience. 

Another option that also maintains partial control over the content displayed is the Dynamic Playlist as it holds the ability to select the videos according to the Tags in the metadata, eliminating the manual production of adding each video to the playlist. If the goal is to exclusively display tennis content, as an example, a publisher can add the Tags surrounding this sport. Tags can be as descriptive as required, for instance, the publisher could choose to select videos only from the Australian Open. 

As a scenario, if the data indicates a segment of returning users constantly searching for soccer content, then a Semantic playlist would ideally work best as you can enter the necessary metadata and the algorithm will pair a relevant video to the article based on its focus, which in this case is soccer. 

Using our Semantic Algorithm is exceedingly beneficial if the goal is to build off users' previous experience to keep them engaged and frequently active. The algorithm pairs articles that the users have shown interest in in the past and eliminate the possibility of irrelevant content being displayed and potentially negatively impacting user experience. 

Following the release of this, we experienced an increase in time spent on-page and user engagement, as interest carried over from the user's article to the contextually matched video.

The objective here is to target a specific audience so that you can deliver the right message at the right time resulting in increased consumer engagement and satisfaction. 

To read further about audience segmentation, you can visit our blog dedicated to this topic.

Determine How “Hands-On” You Want to Be:

Just like determining which management style is best suited for your company, you need to consider which approach would work best for how much control you require over the displayed content. 

As a scenario, larger-scale publishing brands that contain the resources and dedicated teams for video content may experience the benefits of having more control over each video that is hand-picked for the site. Publishers also have the option of selecting a combination of Playlists for their brands according to the article strategies and goals. 

For instance, our 90 Min brand here at Minute Media incorporates a combination of each playlist for certain post pages. Such as the setup for the home page may use the Dynamic Playlist, rolling different videos using the Tags selected, whereas the post page setups could include specific videos the 90 Min Team selected purposely that best suits the article, therefore benefiting from the Freestyle Playlist. 

A different example that highlights the benefits of selecting a more "Hands-on" approach could be a publishing brand wanting to target baseball fans. By using the Freestyle Playlist, they can select videos not just on a league level (i.e. MLB), but rather on a team level (i.e. New York Yankees) to ensure they are getting the most relevant content to their fandom.

Allow the Data to Do the Hard Work

Contrary to the "Hands-On" approach, selecting our Dynamic or Semantic Playlist can help you avoid the never-ending demand of adding new and relevant videos to your playlists. By allowing the tags and metadata to select the videos in real-time, you have a more "Hands-Free" experience and can trust our semantic recommendation engine to pair videos to relevant articles. 

This option has shown tremendous benefits for brands that require contextually relevant videos on their site to match the text-based content. This way, by using tags that include this information, our system will select and generate new and exciting content to be displayed while maintaining only relevant content. 

Having a "Hands-Free" approach can save time and resources that you require if you’re constantly selecting videos manually. 

Smaller-scale publishing brands that may not have a dedicated team for video content can rely on the Tags included (or excluded) in the Dynamic or Semantic Playlist to automatically select the videos that they frequently write about.

Conclusion

In conclusion, each of the three playlists offered in Voltax Video holds significant benefits for different scenarios, articles, or audiences. Whether you need a "Hands-on", or "Hands-off" approach, our team at Minute Media has developed a tool at the forefront of online video.

While selecting a playlist requires the user to be thoughtful and strategic in order to garner the best results, much like testing and buying a new pair of running shoes, we hope our Top 3 Tips have assisted you in narrowing down the best 'fit' for your brand.